


Steel Hearts

by Diaph



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Bisexual Clarke Griffin, Butch Lexa, Coming Out, Coming of Age, F/F, Fine Stud Lexa (The 100), High School AU, Lesbian Character, Lesbian Relationship, Lesbians Falling In Love, Masculine Lexa, Popular Clarke Griffin, Romance, Slow Burn, lesbian love, lesbian story, lexa saves clarke
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-31 01:10:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20783513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Diaph/pseuds/Diaph
Summary: High school is a dog-eat-dog world. If you're not on the top, you're on the bottom. Clarke Griffin may as well have been Queen Regent of Blue River, and it was a status she had earned the hard way around. It all begins to unravel after the house party, after the night Lexa Woods, resident butch lesbian, saved her despite great consequence to herself.





	Steel Hearts

Clarke had thought about it often; the junior and freshman years, the social circles she moved within, the jocks who chased her, the blazing summers—hot, stifling, bright evenings spent going nowhere fast with Sean Kingston playing in the background. Clarke Griffin was the girl with the empty house on Saturday nights because her parents were always away on business. The track and field starlet who once ran a five minute mile. She had the nice, shiny BMW in the parking space reserved for Class President. The sure thing for a full ride scholarship. The lipstick sneer, black leather jacket bombardier with a little tattoo of a feather on her wrist to boot. The resident mean girl who could shrivel another human being into a tiny, crushed ball with nothing but a side glance. 

Clarke was the popular girl right up until she just… wasn’t anymore.

It was because of the Lexa Woods incident. She knew it, and she was unresentful about it. The truth was that she had always liked girls too, and she had always been aware that liking girls was simply incompatible with her social standing in a small town like this. It was different when her dad was posted to Germany, at the tender age of fourteen that was the first time she had kissed a girl, the first time she had kissed anyone and  _ really _ meant it. Of course, the year after they moved back to the states, except this time her dad was posted to Fucksville, South of Nowhere, and Clarke did her best with the hand given to her. Right up until Lexa Woods came along, that is.

The thing about Lexa wasn’t just that she was gay. It was that… well… she was butch. Not cool, trendy butch — like the kind of butches on Tumblr in black and white photos who wore back-to-front snapbacks and low hanging skinny jeans with their asses hanging out the back in Tommy Hilfiger boxers. 

Lexa oozed masculinity in a way that was neither fashionable nor reliant on the approval of the bubble universe of Blue River High School. Her daily uniform consisted of a plaid shirt rolled up the arms, worn, straight cut men’s jeans, her long hair pulled up into a ponytail so the homemade undercut that wrapped around her skull was on show, unless it was a particularly bright day, in which case she wore an old nike baseball cap (the right way around). She was thick and muscular in the forearms, in her shoulders too, her body sinewy from all kinds of sports and mechanics, which Clarke knew as much because she had often passed the Woods’ residence on her Saturday morning jog and caught sight of Lexa up the drive, half buried under the gut of her truck, fixing one thing or another with her scuffed steel toes poking out. Lexa was a dyke, plain as could be. That was what Blue River High School had to say on the matter, and if Lexa gave a single ever-loving fuck then she did not let on.

It all started on a Saturday morning in the first, tentative weeks of Summer.

“It’s your coolant.” Lexa pointed at the steaming, stalled BMW that had collapsed and given up not even halfway down the street, chewing gum in a way that made her jowls move side to side. “Either that or the water pump is fucked, both are pretty common with European imports… Fords are more reliable, less fashionable, but they’ll sure enough get you wherever you need to be.” She scratched the back of her undercut.

It wasn’t the most romantic first encounter, in fact it left Clarke damn near seething out of her ears. She had places to be. She had people to see. She had a small town to lord over because she, the popular girl, maintained that god-given right. Clarke puffed and stared at the lesbian across the street staring right back at her.

“What? Do you think I keep a Ford Edge in my purse for emergencies?” Clarke barked and wobbled on her heels around the hood of her car.

Slowly, Lexa smirked and nodded her head. “Well I was feeling generous. I was even going to offer to take a look under the hood for you… but if you want to be prissy about it…”

“You think you can get it working?” Clarke changed her tune suddenly, because if they got this show on the road then she might still be able to make her two o’clock at the nail salon, just maybe.

“Sure can. Take the handbrake off, we’ll roll it to mine and I’ll take a look under the hood for you.” Lexa walked over with her hands dug in her pockets. “When was the last time you put coolant in?” She scratched her brow.

“What’s coolant?” Clarke blinked.

Lexa paused and her brow grew weighty and serious. 

“Well, there’s my diagnostic complete…” She rolled her eyes. “You grab the other side, we’ll haul it up to mine and see what we can do.” She smiled slightly.

***

“So you invited the lesbian?” Amber said under her breath, quietly. “You just… invited the lesbian to the party?” She blinked.

“It’s my house, you can leave if you want to.” Clarke folded her arms and made no bones about it. Considering she was much drunker than usual, she was doing a good job at hiding it.

The party was rip-roaring, the way it was every Saturday when her folks were out of town. The party spilled out onto the patio, into the pool, clusters of teenagers dotted around every available inch of the garden. Lexa just sat on a sunlounger by herself and sipped a beer, watching red zone sports highlights on her phone, unimpressed and simultaneously unconcerned that she was the odd one out. Still, an hour since her arrival, Clarke hadn’t mustered the courage to go up and talk to her.

“Since when did you and Lexa become tight?” Tiffany smirked and leaned against the counter where they were all grouped together.

“She fixed my car earlier. What was I supposed to do? Not invite her?” Clarke brushed it off defensively and wobbled slightly on her feet. “She’s nice, kind of.” She shrugged.

“Kind of?” Her friends said in surprised chorus.

“Yeah, kind of.” Clarke rolled her eyes and grabbed her red solo cup from the counter. “I feel a little funny, I’m going to use the bathroom real quick. Tiffany you’re in charge of making sure nobody burns the house down.”

“You good Clarke?” John appeared out of nowhere with a protective hand around the back of her arm. “You’re looking a little wobbly there…” His face was full of concern.

“I was just…” Clarke blinked rapidly and rubbed her head, her thoughts evaporating like steam. “I was just… I was going to the bathroom.” She swallowed hard and felt a strange, hot and woozy feeling come over her entire body.

“Let me help you up the stairs,” John said with a small smile.

***

Clarke woke up bleary-eyed across her bed in the same clothes she wore the night before. The headache… it was soul destroying. It was entirely unusual because Clarke was many things but stupid enough to get black out drunk while hosting a party in her parents home? Never. Not once. Her dad was lenient when it came to get togethers, but he was an army man who would notice a single picture slightly out of place nonetheless. Beneath her holier than thou show, Clarke deeply respected her parents, and she would  _ never _ get drunk enough to earn a hangover.

There were eighty-six text messages and three missed calls when she managed to muster the energy to check her phone, which was the second alarm bell that something had gone terribly wrong. Clarke rubbed her headache and clicked into the group chat.

**Tiffany:** I knew that fucking dyke was up to something weird last night, the way she was looking at Clarke… it was predatory.

**Amber:** I know, me too. Thank god you were there to save her John.

**John:** I know, I just wish we noticed that she spiked Clarke’s drink sooner.

**Tiffany:** Poor Clarke.  **@Clarke Griffin** , you have nothing to be embarrassed about. That girl Lexa spiked and attacked you last night, that’s just how they prey on straight girls. I read about it on Breitbart.

**Amber:** **@Clarke Griffin**, me and Tiff cleaned up downstairs. Don’t worry when you wake up if you’re weirded out, we’ll explain everything.

**John:** What is there to explain? The Dyke spiked her drink. I caught her trying to undress Clarke in the bathroom while she was passed out. She hit me when I shouted for you guys. I broke her nose. End of discussion.

**Amber:** John! Jesus, have a little sensitivity?!

**John:** Maybe it’s just easier if we put the videos in the GC so Clarke can catch herself up before any rumours start flying around about what happened… 

**Tiffany:** **@John** you’re not seriously worried we believed that fucking freak when she blamed you?

**John:** **@Tiffany** well it’s a fucking hard time to be a dude right now. This whole #MeToo and #BelieveAllWomen thing? She’s probably writing a whole thing on Tumblr right now painting me as some kind of predator to cover her own ass.

**Amber:** _Video File Attachment _— **@Clarke Griffin**, in case you want to know what happened last night for yourself. Or, you know, use it as evidence if you want to press charges. Trigger warning: it’s a tough watch.

Mind racing a million miles an hour, her memory nothing more than fragments of bits from the night before — which all inconveniently ended at the bottom of her staircase with John’s arm around her back when she tried to get up to the bathroom, Clarke clicked into the video file with bated breath.

The video began to play. She was half on the floor and half hung over the toilet. It made her horrified and wide-eyed, embarrassed, humiliated, unsure of how that could have happened, unsure that she wanted to know the details. Her dress was pulled up around her hips, her underwear on show and half down her bottom. Quickly, Amber and Tiffany ran into the shot and pulled her dress back down, made her decent, both of them scooping underneath each armpit to haul her up. The sound of people shouting and swearing raged in the background like a witch trial or a lynching, all of the voices shouting some iteration of, ‘The dyke spiked Clarke!’

“I found him on top of her!” Lexa said in the video, stumbling backwards with a busted nose. “He had her pressed over—” Another smack knocked the words out of her mouth.

“It was her!” John quickly defended himself and pushed Lexa hard into the tiles. “I left Clarke for two seconds so I could grab a t-shirt for her to put on and when I came back the dyke was pulling at her dress!”

Clarke threw her phone across the room and pulled her knees up to her chest, frightened, angry, scared, confused, all of these things too suddenly to make sense of anything. She closed her eyes and tried to remember something, anything, just a fragment of what happened in the bathroom. There was nothing. There wasn’t a single memory of anything that had happened. The only thing Clarke knew for certain was that John had taken her upstairs to the bathroom, and Lexa hadn’t so much as waved let alone got close enough to put something in her drink.

It somehow made it all the more unimaginable in her mind, the thought of one of her best friends doing that to her. And, yet, Clarke knew deep down there was no other alternative version of events — none that made sense at least.

Clarke didn’t even bother taking a shower, didn’t even bother brushing her teeth, she simply pulled on her sweatpants and zipped on a hoodie. There was only one person who she felt could give her the true version of events, and it certainly wasn’t anyone who belonged in her Whatsapp group.

  
  
  
[Find more of the good gay shit here](https://diaphdiaph.tumblr.com)


End file.
